Still, it is highly unusual for an Iowa governor to endorse a candidate in a contested race for the Republican nomination, particularly this close to the Iowa caucuses, which will be held Jan. 15, a little more than two months from now. The move could give a much-needed boost to DeSantis, as the Florida governor has been well behind former president Donald Trump in polls.
DeSantis and his backers have invested heavily in Iowa, where his campaign is moving one-third of his staff. An NBC/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released last week had the Florida governor tied for second at 16 percent with former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
DeSantis and Haley, however, are polling far behind Trump, who has maintained a commanding lead among Republicans running for president in 2024 in the first-in-the nation Iowa caucuses. In the Register poll, 43 percent of likely caucus-goers picked Trump as their first-choice GOP presidential candidate.
While DeSantis has long held the No. 2 spot in polls, Haley has started to chip away at his numbers, with the latest Iowa poll showing that her standing there is rising — and DeSantis’s is declining.
But Trump’s lead over the field is now 27 points, slightly larger than in August. The new poll also finds that his supporters are more enthusiastic and more settled on their choice than supporters of Haley or DeSantis.
While Democrats have removed Iowa from being their first state in the presidential nominating process, Republicans continue to see the state as the first test of a candidate’s strength and momentum.
Trump’s sizable lead in Iowa has persisted even as he has declined to show up to some events that presidential candidates traditionally frequent, defied a number of other Iowa campaign traditions and criticized Reynolds.
Reynolds will appear at a DeSantis rally in Des Moines on Monday at 6 p.m. Central time.
NBC News had first reported Reynolds’s planned endorsement. The DeSantis campaign and Reynolds’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out against Reynolds, who has held a close relationship with DeSantis throughout the primary. In July, the former president criticized her in a post on Truth Social, his social media site, after Reynolds vowed to remain neutral in the early stages of the Iowa primary — as many governors have done in the past in the crucial early state.
“I opened up the Governor position for Kim Reynolds, & when she fell behind I ENDORSED her, did big Rallies, & she won,” Trump said back then. “Now, she wants to remain ‘NEUTRAL.’ I don’t invite her to events!”
The two also clashed after Trump said banning abortion after six weeks is “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake” in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September. Both DeSantis and Reynolds have supported legislation that would do just that.
“It’s never a ‘terrible thing’ to protect innocent life. I’m proud of the fetal heartbeat bill the Iowa legislature passed and I signed in 2018 and again earlier this year,” Reynolds wrote on X, without naming Trump.
And while criticizing Reynolds has not appeared to have a significant effect on Trump’s poll numbers in the state, it is worth noting that, while he won Iowa by 8 percentage points in 2020, Reynolds easily outperformed him in 2022 — she was reelected by 18.6 percentage points.
Trump has opted out of a number of Iowa campaign traditions this year and did not participate in Reynolds’s fireside chats with candidates during the state fair. Instead, he arrived at the fair by helicopter and bragged about the size of his crowds.
Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.